What can we say about President Hope/Change's debut? It is probably just enough to say that it has confirmed the warning that his supporters had set their expectations rather high.
On appointments, we wonder whether all the folks with tax issues were deliberately chosen to distract the public from the appointment as CIA director of a career politician with no intelligence experience. Last we checked, Leon Panetta was a hack for the Clintons. Is he there as a payback for something that Obama owes Hillary?
At any rate, Dashele and company have certainly demonstrated that the Party of Jackson is not the Party of the People as it and its progenitor style it. The People don't generally have to worry about whether they've declared their free limousine as income or paid unemployment tax on their two nannies.
But policies, not personalities are the most pressing problem. First to the miserable "stimulus" bill. Nowhere are its gargantuan excess, absence of focus, and multiple layers of political paybacks better enumerated than at National Review. We note that America decided it wanted as President a Senator with no record of writing legislation. That's obviously what it got. Now it will get a bill for the services that he has contracted out to Ms. Pelosi's zoo animals.
Meanwhile, lefty pundits are almost silly in their uncritical boosting of Obama's stimulus and hysterical objections to GOP insistence on some focus. One actually reads these days that it doesn't matter what the money is spent on as long as it's spent. For such insights one needs a PhD in economics, apparently, especially to say such things right after having blamed profligate Wall Street executives for ruining the economy with their undisciplined investing.
Aside from the dreadful fiscal non-policy, Obama's opening fortnight has been filled mostly with moralistic (viewed from a left-of-center morality) executive orders. In this respect, he reminds us most of another idealistic Democrat, Mr. Carter, not least in his penchant for scolding Americans when they resist his high-minded exhortations.
These policy observations bring us back to personalities. Washington watchers have tended to see Larry Summers as the most formidable individual in Obama's inner circle. Summers is no fool and doesn't seem to countenance them either. Before the inauguration, he made a special point of stressing that economic relief must be timely, targeted and temporary. It is, of course, none of those. We wonder when we can expect to hear anonymous reports of Summers at war with others in the White House, or of Summers left out in the cold as Obama continues to lean on his Congressional buddies to write policy.
None of this cheers us. But having lived through Mr. Carter's era, we remain hopeful, not necessarily because we expect better of Obama but because Americans have proved they can recover from the worst.
1 comment:
I also heard one commentator note that Obama has already broken his promise not to raise taxes on those making less than $250,000 a year by endorsing a cigarette tax increase. Cigarette smokers are, after all, disproportionately represented among low-income workers.
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